Research: 2013 Virtualization Management Survey

We revamped our InformationWeek 2013 Virtualization Management Survey to reflect some new realities: This technology is extending from servers to applications, storage and the network itself. Exploits targeting the hypervisor are the real deal. And automated service delivery is the future — unless you want to find yourself employed managing cloud providers instead of doing IT in house.

Once you’ve taken the principles of virtualization and instilled them into every layer of the stack, you must make everything work together, seamlessly, in a way that you can trust, ­reproduce and deliver with a high degree of accuracy. A tall order, even for companies like VMware that have a habit of reinventing the market, and one made even more ­difficult by the fragmentation of the hypervisor landscape.

And, while the overall vision may be grand and sweeping, there is a dark lining in this ­silver cloud. Security has become a major concern at the hypervisor level. Vulnerabilities aimed at systems that were previously (albeit erroneously) considered invulnerable have begun to crop up with some regularity; hopefully that’s prompting hard thinking about how security concerns are assessed and remediated as we move into the hypervisor-­enabled service-oriented IT future. (R5961112)